Psalm 6: Penitential Plea in Illness

Early Christian tradition identified seven Penitential Psalms used for confession and self-examination: 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130 and 143. Psalm 6 stands first in that series. The psalmist is sick. His bones are troubled, his soul is troubled and his eye is wasted with grief. In the ancient Israelite world serious illness was often read as divine discipline, and this psalmist accepts that framing without protest. He does not argue that he is innocent. He only asks that the discipline not be carried out in anger and pleads for mercy on the basis of God's character. The reasoning in verse 5 is striking to modern ears: "in death there is no remembrance of you; in Sheol who can praise You?" "Sheol" in this period of Hebrew thought was the gathered dead, a shadowy and neutral underworld, neither the heaven nor the hell of later Christian theology. The psalmist's logic is liturgical. Healing keeps a worshiper in the choir of the living. The dead in Sheol cannot lift the song.

Then comes one of the most characteristic moves in the lament psalms. After weeping that floods the bed at night, the tone breaks open in verse 8 without explanation: "the LORD has heard." No new event is reported. Something has shifted in the prayer itself, and the psalmist turns on his enemies and tells them to depart. Jesus uses nearly the same words in Matthew 7:23: "Depart from Me, you workers of lawlessness." The gospel picks up the psalmist's command and places it on the lips of the judge at the last day. In David's mouth it is the cry of a sufferer regaining his footing. In Christ's mouth it is the verdict. Reading the two together teaches Christian readers to hear the psalmist's words with sober ears, knowing whose voice will one day speak them with final authority.